Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle
Page 52
Another step, and another after, moving sideways now without realizing that he was doing so, the serpent-smell pressing on him like a smothering blanket, making his breath come shorter and shallower. Once he lurched to one knee, twice into the wall, unsure now of whether he was stumbling upstairs or down… then he did hear the scream.
It was a woman’s scream, not a man’s. And it came, not from Minister Morioka’s quarters, but from those of the Lord Kuroda and the Lady Hara.
For an instant, Junko was too stupefied to be afraid; it was as though the strings of his mind had been cut, as well as those of his petrified body. Then he uttered a wordless cry that he himself never heard, and sprang toward the daimyo’s rooms, kicking off his slippers when they skidded on the polished floors.
Lady Hara screamed again, as Junko burst through the rice-paper door, stumbling over the wreckage of shattered tansu chests and shoji screens. He could not see her or Lord Kuroda at first: the vast figure in his path seemed to draw all light and shape and color into itself, so that nothing was real except the towering horns, the cloven hooves, the sullen gleam of the reptilian scales from the waist down, the unbearable stench of simmering bone….
“Ushi-oni!” He heard it in his mind as an insect whisper. Lord Kuroda was standing between his wife and the demon, legs braced in a fighting stance, wakizashi sword trembling in his old hand. The ushi-oni roared like a landslide and knocked the sword across the room. Lord Kuroda drew his one remaining weapon, the tanto he carried always in his belt. The ushi-oni made a different sound that might have been laughter. The dagger fell to the floor.
Junko said, “Sayuri.”
The great thing turned at his voice, as the black bear had done, and he saw the nightmare cow-face, and the rows of filthy fangs crowding the slack, drooling lips. And—as he had seen it in the red eyes of the bear—the unmistakable recognition.
“My wife,” Junko said. “Come away.”
The ushi-oni roared again, but did not move, neither toward him, nor toward Lord Kuroda and Lady Hara. Junko said, “Come. I never meant this. I never meant this.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Junko saw the daimyo moving to recover his fallen dagger. But the ushi-oni’s attention was all on Junko, the mad yellow-white eyes had darkened to a dirty amber, and the claws on its many-fingered hands had all withdrawn slightly. Junko faced it boldly, all unarmed as he was, saying again, “Come away, Sayuri. We do not belong here, you and I.”
He knew that if he turned his head he would see a blinking, quaking Minister Morioka behind him in the ruined doorway, but for that he cared nothing now. He took a few steps toward the ushi-oni, halting when it growled stinking fire and backed away. Junko did not speak further, but only reached out with his eyes. We know each other.
He was never to learn whether the monster that had been—that was—his wife would have come to him, nor what would have been the result if it had. Lady Hara, suddenly reaching the limit of her body’s courage, uttered a tiny sigh, like a child falling asleep, and collapsed to the floor. The ushi-oni began to turn toward her, and at that moment the Lord Kuroda lunged forward and struck with all the strength in his old arm. The tanto buried itself to the coral-ornamented hilt in the right side of the demon.
The ushi-oni’s howl shook the room and seemed to split Junko’s head, bringing blood even from his eyes, as well as from his ears and nose. A great scaled paw smashed him down as the creature roared and reeled in its death agony, trampling everything it had not already smashed to splinters, dragging ancient scrolls and brush paintings down from the walls, crushing the Lord Kuroda family shrine underfoot. The ushi-oni bellowed unceasingly, the sound slamming from wall back to broken wall, and everyone hearing it bellowed with the same pain, bleeding like Junko and like him holding, not their heads and faces, but their hearts. When the demon fell, and was silent, the sound continued on forever.
But even forever ends, and there came a time when Junko pulled himself to his feet. He found himself face to face with Minister Morioka, pale as a grubworm, gabbling like an infant, walking as though he had just learned how. Others were in the room now, all shouting, all brandishing weapons, all keeping their distance from the great, still thing on the floor. He saw the Lord Kuroda, far away across the ruins, bending over Lady Hara, carefully and tenderly lifting her to her feet while staring strangely at Junko. Whatever his face, as bloody as Junko’s own, revealed, it was neither anger nor outrage, but Junko looked away anyway.
The ushi-oni had not moved since its fall, but its eyes were open, unblinking, darkening. Junko knelt beside it without speaking. The fanged cow-lips twitched slightly, and a stone whisper reached his ear and no other, shaping two words. “My nature….” There were no more words, and no sound in the room.
Junko said, “She was my wife.”
No one answered him, not until the Lord Kuroda said, “No.” Junko realized then that the expression in his master’s eyes was one of deepest pity. Lord Kuroda said, “It is not possible. An ushi-oni may take on another shape if it wishes, being a demon, but in death it returns to its true being, always. You see that this has not occurred here.”
“No,” Junko answered him, “because this was Sayuri’s natural form. This is what she was, but she did not know it, no more than I. I swear that she did not know.” He rose, biting his lower lip hard enough to bring more blood to his mouth, and faced the daimyo directly. He said, “This was my doing. All of it. The weasel, the wolf, the bear—she meant only to help me, and I… I did not want to know.” He looked around at the shattered room filled with solemn people in nightrobes and armor. “Do you understand? Any of you?”
The Lord Kuroda’s compassionate manner had taken on a shade of puzzlement; but the Lady Hara was nodding her elegant old head. Behind Junko, Minister Morioka had at last found language, though his stammering voice retained none of its normal arrogance. He asked timidly, “How could an ushi-oni not know what it was? How could such a monster ever marry a human being?”
“Perhaps because she fell in love,” the Lady Hara said quietly. “Love makes one forget many things.”
“I cannot speak for my wife,” Junko replied. “For myself, there are certain things I will remember while I live, which I beg will not be long.” He turned his eyes to Minister Morioka. “I wanted her to kill you. I never said it in those words—never—but I made very sure she knew that I wanted you out of my way, as she had removed three others. I ask your pardon, and offer my head. There can be no other atonement.”
Then the Minister shrank back without replying, for while he had no objection to the death penalty, he greatly preferred to see it administered by someone else. But the Lord Kuroda asked in wonder, “Yet the ushi-oni came here, to these rooms, not to Minister Morioka’s quarters. Why should she—it—have done so?”
Junko shook his head. “That I cannot say. I know only that I am done with everything.” He walked slowly to retrieve the daimyo’s sword, brought it to him, and knelt again, baring his neck without another word.
Lord Kuroda did not move or speak for a long time. The Lady Hara put her hand on his arm, but he did not look at her. At last he set the wakizashi back in its lacquered sheath, the soft click the only sound in the ravaged room, which seemed to have turned very cold since the fall of the ushi-oni. He touched Junko’s shoulder, beckoning him to rise.
“Go in peace,” he said without expression, “if there is any for you. No harm will come to you, since it will be known that you are still under the protection of the Lord Kuroda. Farewell… Junko-san.”
A moment longer they stared into one another’s eyes; then Junko bowed to his master and his master’s lady, turned like a soldier, and walked away, past smashed and shivered tengu furniture, past Minister Morioka—who would not look at him—through the crowd of gaping, muttering retainers, and so out of the Lord Kuroda’s castle. He did not return to his quarters for any belongings, but went away barefoot, clad only in his kimono, and he looked back only once, when he s
melled the smoke and knew that the servants were already burning the body of the ushi-oni that was also his wife Sayuri. Then he went on.
And no one ever would have known what became of him, if the old priest Yukiyasa had not been the patient, inquisitive man that he was. Some years after the disappearance of Minister Junko, the commoner who had ridden at the right hand of a daimyo for a little while, Yukiyasa left his Shinto shrine in the care of a disciple, picked up his staff and his begging bowl, and set off on a trail long since grown cold. But it was not the first such trail that he had followed in his life, and he possessed the curious patience of the very old that is perhaps the closest mortal approach to immortality. The journey was a trying one, but many peasant families were happy to please the gods by offering him lodging, and peasants have long memories. It took the priest less time than one might have expected to track Junko to a village that barely merited the title, on a brook that was called a river by the people living there. For that matter, Junko himself was not known in the village by his rightful name, but as Toru, which is wayfarer. Yukiyasa found him at the brook in the late afternoon, lying flat on his belly, fishing for salmon by the oldest method there is, which is tickling them slowly and gently, until they fall asleep, and then scooping them into a net. There were already six fish on the grass beside him.
Junko was coaxing a seventh salmon to the bank, and did not look up or speak when the old priest’s shadow fell over him. Not until he had landed the last fish did he say, “I knew it was you, Turtle. I could always smell you as far as the summer island.”
Yukiyasa took no offense at this, but only chuckled as he sat down. “The incense does cling. Others have mentioned it.”
Neither spoke for some time, but each sat considering the other. To the priest’s eye, Junko looked brown and healthy enough, but notably older than he should have. His face was thinner, his hair had turned completely white, and there was an air about him, not so much of loneliness as of solitude, as though what lived inside him had left no room for another living being, or even a living thought. He chose a good name, Yukiyasa thought. “You do well here, my son?”
“As well as I may.” Junko shrugged. “I hunt and fish for the folk here, and mend their poor flimsy dams and weirs, as I was raised to do. And they in turn shelter me, and call me Wayfarer, and ask no questions. I am where I belong.”
To this Yukiyasa knew not what to say, and they two were silent again, until Junko asked finally, “Akira Yamagata, the horsemaster—he is well?”
“Gone these two years and more,” the priest replied gently, for he knew of the friendship. Junko inquired after a few other members of Lord Kuroda’s household, but not once about the daimyo himself, or about Lady Hara. Wondering on this, and thinking to provoke Junko beyond prudence, Yukiyasa began to speak of the successes of Masanori Morioka. “Since you… since you left, the ascent in his fortunes has been astonishing. He is very nearly a Council of Ministers in himself now—and the lord being old, and without children….” He shrugged, leaving the sentence deliberately unfinished.
“Well, well,” Junko said mildly, almost to himself. “Well, well.” He smiled then, for the first time at the puzzled priest, and it was a smile of such piercing amusement as even Yukiyasa had never seen in all his long life. “I am pleased for him, and wish him all success. Let him know of it.”
“This after you sent an ushi-oni to destroy him?” It was not Yukiyasa’s custom ever to raise his voice, but perplexity was bringing him close to it. “You said yourself that you wished Minister Morioka dead and out of your way. Sayuri died of that envy.” Startled and frightened by the anger in his words, he repeated them nevertheless, realizing that he had loved the woman who was no woman. “She died because you were insanely, cruelly jealous of that man you praise now.”
Junko’s smile vanished, replaced, not by anger of his own, but by the same weary knowledge that had aged his face. “Not so, though I wish it were. You have no idea how I wish that were true.” He was silent for a time, looking away as he began to gather the seven salmon into a rush-lined basket. Then he said, still not meeting the priest’s eyes, “No. My wife died because she understood me.”
“What nonsense is this?” Yukiyasa cried out. He was deeply ashamed of his loss of control, yet for once refused to restrain himself. “I warned you, I warned you, in so many words, never again to coax her to change form—never to let her do it, for your sake and her own—and see what came of your disregard! She yielded once more to your desire, set forth to murder Minister Morioka, as she had slain others, and thereby rediscovered the terrible truth she had forgotten for love of you. For love of you!” The old priest was on his feet now, trembling and sweating, jabbing his finger at Junko’s expressionless face. “Understand you? How could she understand such a man? She only loved, and she died of it, and it need not have happened so. It need not have happened!”
The sky was going around in great, slow circles, and Yukiyasa thought that it would be sensible to sit down, but he could not find his feet. Someone was saying somewhere, a long way off, “She loved me when she was an otter.” Then Junko had him by the shoulders, and was guiding him carefully through the long journey back to the grass and the ground. In time the sky stopped spinning, and Yukiyasa drank cold brook water from Junko’s cupped hands and said, “Thank you. I am sorry.”
“No need,” Junko replied. “You have the right of it as much as anyone ever will. But Sayuri knew something that no one else knew, not even I myself.” He paused, waiting until the priest’s color had returned and his heartbeat had ceased to shake his body so violently. Then he said, “Sayuri knew that in my soul, in the darkest corner of my soul, I wished her to go exactly where she did go. And it was not to Minister Morioka’s quarters.”
It took the priest Yukiyasa no time at all, dazed as he still was, to comprehend what he had been told, but a very long while indeed to find a response. At last he said, almost whispering, “The Lord Kuroda loved you. Like a son.”
Junko nodded without answering. Yukiyasa asked him hesitantly, “Did you imagine that if Sayuri… if Lord Kuroda were gone, you might somehow become daimyo yourself?”
“‘Like a son’ is not like being a son,” Junko replied. “No, I had no such expectations. My master, in his generosity, had raised me higher than I could possibly have conceived or deserved, being who I am—what I am. In a hundred lifetimes, how should I ever hold any grievance against the Lord Kuroda?”
Twilight had arrived as they spoke together, and fires were being lighted in the nearest huts. Junko stood up, slinging the fish basket over his shoulder. Looking down at Yukiyasa, his face appearing younger with the eyes in shadow, he said, “But Sayuri knew the ushi-oni in me, the thing that hated having been shown all that I could not have or be, and that wished, in the midst of luxury, to have been left where I belonged—in a place just like this one, where not one person knows how to write the words daimyo or shogun, and samurai is a word that comes raiding and killing, trampling our crops, burning our homes. Do you hear what I am telling you, priest of the kami? Do you hear?”
He pulled Yukiyasa to his feet, briefly holding the old man close as a lover, though he did not seem to notice it. He said, very quietly, “I loved Lord Kuroda for the man he was. But from the day I entered his castle—a ragged, ignorant boy from a ragged village of which he was ignorant—I hated him for what he was. I spent days and years forgetting that I hated him and all his kind, every moment denying it in my heart, in my mind, in my bones.” For a moment he put his hand hard over his mouth, as though to stop the words from coming out, but they came anyway. “Sayuri… Sayuri knew my soul.”
A child’s voice called from the village, the sound sweetly shrill on the evening air. Junko smiled. “I promised her family fish tonight. We must go.”
He took Yukiyasa’s elbow respectfully, and they walked slowly away from the river in the fading light. Junko asked, “You will rest here for a few days? It is a long road home. I know.”
“And I him. Tell him I will forget my own name before I forget his kindness.” A sudden whisper of a laugh. “Though I am Toru now, and no one will ever call me Junko again, I think.”
“Junko-san,” Yukiyasa corrected him. “Even now, he always asks after Junko-san.”
Neither spoke again until they had entered the village, and muddy children were clinging to Junko’s legs, dragging him toward a hut further on. Then the priest said quietly, “She really believed she was human. She might never have known.” Junko bowed his head. “Did you believe it yourself, truly? I have wondered.”
The answer was almost drowned out by the children’s yelps of happiness and hunger. “As much as I ever believed I was Junko-san.”
THE ROCK IN THE PARK
Van Cortlandt Park begins a few blocks up Gunhill Road: past the then-vacant lot where us neighborhood kids fought pitched battles over the boundaries of our parents’ Victory Gardens; past Montefiore Hospital, which dominates the entire local skyline now; past Jerome Avenue, where the IRT trains still rattle overhead, and wicked-looking old ladies used to sit out in front of the kosher butcher shops, savagely plucking chickens. It’s the fourth-largest park in New York City, and on its fringes there are things like golf courses, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, bike and horse trails, a cross-country track and an ice-skating rink—even a cricket pitch. That’s since my time, the cricket pitch.